What is the best resource planning software in 2026?

Float does one thing and does it well: one row per person, bars per project, and a gauge that tells you right away if someone is underbooked or over capacity. Time off and public holidays sit in the same view, so you spot the gap before you promise a client a date.

Starter costs $7 per scheduled person per month and already covers the core: scheduling, capacity and time off, project scoping, role suggestions, the API and integrations. You get 1 placeholder (a "designer to hire" you can drop on the schedule before you have a name) and 7 days of history. Pro, at $12, adds time tracking, project cost estimates, multi-currency rate cards, advanced reports, SSO, 5 placeholders and 180 days of history.

Here's what matters on the invoice: only scheduled people count. A project manager who views without being scheduled, or a client you invite, costs nothing. User reviews mostly praise the per-resource price as low for what you get.

The catch: the same reviews say the bill climbs fast as the team grows, scrolling gets slow on very large schedules and on mobile, and time tracking stays lighter than a dedicated timesheet tool. Starter's 7-day history starts to hurt as soon as you want to compare planned versus actual for the quarter.

Tip: the 30-day trial runs on Pro. Note during that month whether you actually use time tracking and more than one placeholder. If not, Starter is enough, and you save $5 per person, or $600 a year for a team of 10.

Resource Guru thinks in bookings: you book a person on a project the way you'd book a meeting room. If you go past their available hours, the tool flags it and puts the request on a waiting list instead of letting the clash through. That clash management is what reviewers mention most, along with how quickly people pick it up.

Grasshopper costs $4.16 per person per month billed yearly, $5 monthly. It already includes tentative and recurring bookings, time zones, leave, public holidays, calendar sync, the API and webhooks. Blackbelt ($8 monthly) adds timesheets with approvals, reports, budget tracking, a Gantt view and heatmaps. Master ($12) adds booking approval workflows, SSO and unlimited history. Paying yearly gets you 2 months free.

What makes it different: it also schedules non-human resources. An edit suite, a company car or a piece of measuring equipment costs $2.50 a month on Grasshopper, half the price of a person. No other ranked tool handles that as simply.

The catch: you pay for every scheduled person, whether they log in or not, and the vendor is upfront about it. Users also mention limited integrations and lighter reporting than enterprise tools. Phone support is Master-only.

Tip: placeholders are free (1, 5 or 10 depending on the plan). Create a "developer to hire" instead of adding a real person who hasn't started yet: placeholders don't count toward the bill.

Runn looks ahead. You add a project as "tentative" the day the proposal goes out, assign people or roles, and the capacity and utilization charts show the effect over the next few months. If the deal closes, it becomes confirmed. If not, you drop it and the schedule goes back to how it was.

Lite costs $7 per resource seat per month, with scheduling, tentative projects, capacity charts, skills and tags, and project financials. Standard, at $11, adds timesheets, native integrations, the API, custom fields and an audit log. Advanced, quote-based, unlocks dashboards, unlimited reports and SAML SSO.

The minimum is the deal-breaker for small teams: 20 resource seats. A team of 8 pays $140 a month on Lite, same as a team of 20. User feedback flags this a lot, along with the API and integrations being locked to Standard.

The catch: no free plan, no prorated refunds, and the trial is announced on Standard (the page suggests you email support to try Lite). Under 20 people, Float or Resource Guru cost less.

Tip: save scenarios before every sales meeting. Show your partners two schedules side by side, with and without the prospect's project, and the go or no-go decision rests on real capacity instead of gut feel.

Productive isn't a pure scheduling tool. It's agency management software where resource planning is one module among several, included from the entry plan. Its value is the link between three things other tools keep apart: each person's workload, the budget sold to the client, and billing.

Pricing starts at $10 per user per month on Essential, which already includes resource planning. Higher tiers add deeper financial features. Note that Productive bills per user, not per scheduled person: it's priced like a tool the whole team opens every day.

When you assign a senior designer to a project, you see what their hours cost against the remaining budget. That's the question an agency owner actually asks, and the one Float or Resource Guru leave to a spreadsheet.

The catch: it's a broader tool, so it takes longer to configure, and it often replaces your project tool and your invoicing. User feedback also points to financial reporting that could go further and slowdowns on large schedules. There's no free plan.

Tip: during the 14-day trial, import one finished project with its actual hours. If the margin it calculates matches what your accountant says, the setup time is worth it.

Teamdeck packs scheduling, timesheets, leave, utilization tracking and milestones into every account. There's no plan to pick: every feature is included, and you just pay for seats.

There are two seat types. Light Member, at $2 a month ($1.80 yearly), lets you schedule a person and see them in the calendar and reports, without them opening the app. Full Member, at $6 ($5.40 yearly), gets full access, timesheets, leave and mobile. The vendor gives its own example: 2 Light plus 5 Full comes to $30.60 a month.

That's the best setup for an agency working with regular freelancers: schedule them as Light without paying for full access. Integrations cover Google Calendar and Slack, plus CSV import and an API.

The catch: reviews describe an interface that feels heavy for quick updates, slow loading and reports that are hard to customize. One isolated reviewer mentions bookings or time entries disappearing, which we haven't seen confirmed elsewhere.

Tip: switch anyone who doesn't log hours to Light, like a director who approves but doesn't produce. On a team of 20, that's up to $80 less a month.

monday.com wasn't built for resource planning, but plenty of teams already run their projects there. So the real question is: how far can you go without buying another tool?

On paid plans, the Workload view shows each person's load based on the items assigned to them. The real resource management module, with the Resource Directory, Resource planner and Capacity manager, is Enterprise-only and quote-based. If you buy Pro expecting those features, you won't get them.

The monday community forum is specific about the limits. The Workload view caps the number of boards it pulls together, which rules out a master view across dozens of active projects. Hours get spread evenly across an item's duration, and capacity can be thrown off by completed items. Several teams end up paying for a third-party app to do the scheduling.

Pricing comes from our full monday.com review: Basic $9, Standard $12, Pro $19 per seat per month billed yearly, with a 3-seat minimum. Paying monthly costs about 18% more. Unlike the dedicated tools, every person who logs in pays.

The catch: that's where the 2.8 out of 5 value score comes from. For a 25-person agency that mostly needs a schedule, Float costs less and does more.

Smartsheet Resource Management is the former 10,000ft, acquired by Smartsheet. It isn't a feature of the Smartsheet plans: it's a separate add-on with its own login, sold on top of the Business and Enterprise plans.

It covers what you'd expect from a serious tool: per-person capacity, workload heatmaps, role-based assignments, time tracking, hiring forecasts and scenarios. Placeholders and roles are Enterprise-only. For a team of 50 or more running dozens of projects, it's one of the most complete options here.

The add-on price isn't published: you go through a sales demo. The one sure thing is that you need the Business plan first, at $19 per member per month billed yearly ($24 monthly), with a 3-member minimum. Users mention licenses sold in blocks of 10 and an add-on they find expensive.

The catch: onboarding is heavy. One user describes a month of one person's time to get a team of 10 set up. Others mention slowness and suggest using it alongside another project tool.

If you'd rather leave Smartsheet, our page on switching from Smartsheet covers the replacements and the migration.

Saviom is resource management software built for large organizations: professional services firms, engineering companies, multi-site operations. It handles capacity, skills, leave and forecasting across large headcounts.

Its licensing is unusual. Power licenses let you edit the schedule, Lite licenses let you view and run reports, and Non-User licenses cover scheduled people who don't need access, with no license cost. With 500 technicians scheduled by 10 planners, that logic changes the bill completely compared with a tool that charges for every person.

No prices are published: everything goes through a quote. The vendor mentions a trial without stating its length.

The catch: user feedback describes a long rollout, the need for a dedicated admin, a dated interface and support that can be slow. It's not a tool a 15-person agency opens on a Monday to plan the week.

Tip: before the demo, count your planners and your scheduled people precisely. The split between Power, Lite and Non-User licenses drives the quote, not total headcount.